Lost in Showbiz has long been a fan of the social networking site Twitter. It applauds the way it shifts the balance within the media, allowing celebrities immediate public redress, as evidenced by X Factor runner-up Cher Lloyd's insightful critique of the 3am Girls' online coverage of her burgeoning career: "3am full of shit, shuv your shitty remarks up your arse, put that on ya website, divvy shits."

But it also applauds the way it allows celebrities to reveal a hitherto-unnoticed side to their character, and thus directs you to the Twitter feed of Newcastle midfielder Joey Barton. Formerly best known as the dirtiest player in the premiership, whose hobbies off the pitch largely revolved around punching people, Barton at some point appears to have undergone a dramatic lifestyle transformation that's turned him into a mid-80s undergraduate. He recently posed for a men's magazine looking pensive and clutching a solitary daffodil. Meanwhile his feed offers an improbable stream of socio-political invective, decrying the US as a "fascist regime" and calling upon the proletariat to overthrow the capitalist oligarchy ("working class time to take back what is ours, unite"). It also quotes Smiths lyrics, authors and philosophers (to illuminate his position in his ongoing dispute with Newcastle United's board he variously quoted Orwell, Nietzsche, Virgil, Aristotle and Seneca) as well as aphorisms apparently of his own devising: "ur a massive helmet".

There are those who suggest that Barton's tweeting represents some kind of public meltdown, preferable perhaps to Barton's previous brand of public meltdown – which on one notable occasion involved punching a man 20 times until he rendered him unconscious then knocking out a teenager's teeth – but still offering compelling evidence that footballers need to be trained in social networking before being allowed on Twitter. LiS prefers to believe that it signals the dawn of a new age for football, in which bookish 80s indie, revolutionary socialism and philosophy play a much larger role, and looks forward to Wayne Rooney and Theo Walcott hotly debating the merits of the Go Betweens' Man o'Sand to Girl o'Sea and Adorno's rejection of Kantian aesthetics in favour of a different kind of "truth-content" or wahrheitsgehalt in aesthetic theory, and fully hopes to see Ashley Cole selling Socialist Worker outside Fulham Broadway tube.